Alexander Görlach

Görlach was born as the child of Turkish migrant workers in Ludwigshafen, Germany. Shortly afterwards, he was adopted and raised by a German family.[15][16][17]

After graduating from High School, Görlach received a scholarship from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and subsequently studied Catholic theology and philosophy at University of Mainz, Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome as well as Al-Azhar University in Cairo and the Faculty of Theology in Ankara. He also studied German studies, Political Science and music. He received his PhD in comparative religion from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2006 and in linguistics, in the field of language and politics, from University of Mainz in 2009.[18]

Görlach held several teaching and lecture assignments, amongst others at Freie Universität Berlin.[19]

Alexander Görlach is a member of the German Liberal Party (FDP) which he joined, in September 2016, after having been a member of the German Christian Democratic Party (CDU) for ten years.[20]

Görlach has been working and publishing for several German media outlets, such as ZDF, German Television. He has been and is published in several German media outlets such as Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit und Focus Magazine. From 2007 to 2009 he was executive editor of the online part of Cicero magazine.[21] Today Alex is focused on international publications: He is an op-ed contributor to the New York Times[22] and to The World Post.[23]

From 2009 until 2016, Görlach has been the editor-in-chief and publisher of the opinion magazine The European,[24] which also publishes selected articles in English.[25] Alexander Görlachs weekly editorial has been published in France,[26] Italy[27] and the US.[28] In 2011, Görlach published the book "Freiheit oder Anarchie? Wie das Internet unser Leben verändert" together with Björn Böhning.[29] In 2014 his book "Wir wollen euch scheitern sehen. Wie die Häme unser Land zerfrisst" was published.[30]

In the academic year 2015-2016, Görlach was a Visiting Scholar at the Divinity School of the College of Harvard University, researching about religious identities and their influence and impact on global politics.[31][32][33] In October 2017, he was a Defense of Democracy Program fellow of the F.D. Roosevelt Foundation at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.[34][35] He worked on questions regarding populism, narratives, and liberal democracy. [36][37][38] Alex was also invited in that academic year to become a fellow at the Center for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, UK.[39] Also there he will be working on liberal democracy and the concept of the West.[40] Alex will be lecturing in the academic year 2017-2018 at Taiwan National University, City University of Hong Kong and the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University.[41] Alex’ work is on narratives, mostly religious and ideological, how they shape identity and influence policy-making. In this context Alex looks strongly into the narrative of work and its challenges by artificial intelligence and machine learning.[42]

In 2015 Görlach became a senior advisor to the Berggruen Institute and its Online-Magazine The World Post.[43] Alexander served as Guest Director of "The Times and The London Times Cheltenham Literature Festival" in 2015.[44] In January 2019 he became the founding editor in chief of the new magazine "Conditiohumana".[45]